Sir Ivor Roberts is the retiring ambassador to Italy. It is a tradition that outgoing ambassadors get to make a valedictory dispatch. A chance to say what he really thinks without being too diplomatic about his lords and masters. Sir Ivor, in that fine tradition, has done just that:
In his letter, Roberts painted a picture of a diplomatic service confused about its function and wasteful with taxpayers’ money. “If we spent more on conflict resolution, that is on classical diplomacy, we would spend less on reconstruction and peacekeeping,” he said, in a reference to Lebanon.
But he was also scathing about bureaucratic waste, claiming that the diplomatic service was “terrorised by management analysis forms”. He added: “I’ve been told that the Department for International Development [headed by Hilary Benn] has spent as much on management consultants as the Foreign Office has on its entire budget. We have overindulged in management consultancy.”
Given the source; a man used to couching words diplomatically, this is scathing stuff. And how was this taken by HMG?
But Roberts’s polemic, written this month, so angered the government that within hours Sir Peter Ricketts, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, withdrew the right of retiring ambassadors to pen a swansong…
…This weekend the Foreign Office confirmed that valedictory dispatches had been discontinued.
All too predictable. :dry: